Arctic GIS Workshop Poster Abstract

22-24 January 2001
Bell Harbor International Conference Center
Seattle, Washington

A GIS Database for Glacier Change

Andrew G. Fountain, Frank Granshaw, David Percy
Departments of Geology and Geography, Portland State University, Portland, OR

The current World Glacier Monitoring Service database represents glacier change in terms of scalar quantities (e.g. length change, volume change). However, glaciers are inherently 3-dimensional objects that exhibit topologic features not readily described by scalar quantities. We have developed a GIS database, temporal and spatial in structure, to represent glacier change for the contiguous United States. The data includes digital maps of the glacier surface and subsurface, and positions of moraines indicating prehistoric glacier positions. The database uses ArcView to be the most accessible to the user community. We have populated the database with every known glacier in the contiguous US and are beginning to include historic and prehistoric data sets. We have developed a preliminary version of the database, which will be soon available to all via a web-page at Portland State University.